Evalyn Parry put her wheels in motion for Spin

Evalyn Parry was supposed to be braving traffic on College Street (her preferred cross-town bike route home to Parkdale), or maybe cruising along a trail through the Don Valley or along the lakeshore. But due to the chilly March rain, her planned bike excursion never makes it out of the parkette next to Buddies in Bad Times theatre.

Parry is an avid enough cyclist to have written Spin, an entire theatre piece inspired by her beloved two-wheeler that opened at Buddies this week, and she’s normally not such a fair-weather rider. But she didn’t bring her rain pants today, and is famished after a morning of rehearsal, anyway. So she’s sipping warm miso soup at Kokyo Sushi, just down the street from Buddies, and talking about all the places she’d be biking if spring were here already.

Parry’s new favourite place to bike is the Humber Trail. “I can’t believe I grew up in this city and only just discovered it,” she says. “You can ride north on it for a couple of hours at least — I’m not even sure where it ends.” (Post-interview Internet research says the Humber Trail can take you from Etobicoke all the way up to Vaughan, with a few interruptions, such as crossing Weston Road.)

For lack of a better east-west bike route (“It’s so stupid!” she exclaims, as she rhapsodizes about the pipe dream of bike lanes on Bloor Street), she makes her way to Buddies along College most days, despite having scored “door prizes” twice along that street. Even when she’s not rehearsing a show there, she coordinates a youth program at the theatre, and is generally there several times a week.

Even better, she says, are the rare but treasured occasions she has to go to Harbourfront. “I love cutting through Exhibition Place,” she explains. “And then going all along the lakeshore.”

Parry’s bike enthusiasm runs in the family — she grew up in downtown Toronto, and her family didn’t own a car, so bicycles were taken for granted as a means of transport. A year living in bike-friendly Cambridge, England, helped cement the bicycle as her favourite vehicle.

She tries to cycle in any city she visits, and she longingly compares Toronto’s troubled bike routes to those of Minneapolis, where she performed Spin last year. “Minneapolis is an amazing bike town! They’ve turned these old railway lines into bike paths, so they’re sunken down below street level and you can bike the equivalent of east to west in our city but right downtown,” she enthuses.

“Someone who came to see the show became our ‘Fairy Bike Father’ and lent us bikes so we got to ride while we were there, which was amazing.”

And now, in addition to being her preferred way to get around town, the bicycle has served as artistic inspiration as well.

“I wanted to do something that bridged my worlds of theatre and music and spoken word, and I wanted to write something longer form than a single song,” she says. “I thought I’d look at bikes and I’d look at advertising.”

She was also inspired by early feminist pioneer Susan B. Anthony’s famous comment that “the bicycle has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” And so her research led her to incorporate the theme of how early women’s liberation is tied up with the invention of the bicycle.

“I found this amazing connection between women and cycling in the 19th century, and the birth of the advertising industry being really concurrent with that same period of time — the bike was the first luxury item to be mass marketed in North America,” she says. “So I got excited about that, and then I discovered the story of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to ride around the world on a bike in 1895, and the way she did it was by selling advertising space on her body to pay her way across the world. So all these themes kind of came together.”

Spin plays at Buddies in Bad Times (12 Alexander St.) until March 27. Visit buddiesinbadtimes.com for tickets and more information.